Crackerjack (1994)

Cliffhanger, anyone?

aka "Die hard in a mountain resort"
96min
Notable cast: Thomas Ian Griffith, Christopher Plummer, Nastassja Kinski










As I said before, I'll start sidetracking "every now and then" and thought now is as good a time as any to begin. The quality still has to be shitty, or else it wouldn't fit in here. So I started going through my shelves for something I hadn't seen, at least in a long time, and stumbled upon this one.
Okay, Nastassja Kinski, Christopher Plummer and OH SHIT Thomas Ian Griffith! That was my reaction as I had just few months prior seen the supremely awesome Excessive Force. TIG (as I'll call him from now on) fucking owned that movie even though it had a cast like no other. Excessive Force is full of action and I was fucking thrilled when I found Crackerjack gathering dust in my shelf.

Unfortunately it's not too good.

Crackerjack is another Die Hard ripoff from the 90s and we all love those (at least I and a few other guys I know do). TIG play the titular Jack, a cop on the edge and all that basic action movie stuff. He lost his family in an assassination attempt, so he is suicidal and reckless, a loose cannon goddamnit! So that's where the nickname Crackerjack comes from, not from cracking people up. Well, he does some of that too later, in a more literal way. But anyway, the film starts promisingly enough with a nice shootout in an apartment hallway. Lots of bloody squibs, some arm breaking and bad guys with mullets. Unfortunately that's pretty much the only action in the first 45 minutes. What follows is boring shit about family, love interest, diamond thieves, and how TIG is the only man who can stop them. Fucking half an hour of what could have been told in a few minutes. And what action there is after that is really not that great either. 

After the opening shootout even the violence seems to be little more crappy and toned down.

And the score is fucking abysmal, think of the worst stock music PM Entertainment has to offer and you're not even close.

So a lot of wasted potential here, we all know TIG can execute some serious kicks and here he does nothing, his acting is also sub par. Low quantity of action, few bad lines ("I'm gonna castrate you with a blowtorch") and two exploding helicopters are just not enough, so I'd stay away, unless stumbled upon.

But still, this is far more enjoyable than anything I've watched so far put together. So I'm going to continue these sidetracks, for my own sanitys sake.